THE MIP MAPPER
FOR CARRARA 4/5
The MipMapper is a FREE plug-in extension for Carrara. The code is still under
development but ready for use, sharing and
testing.
Mip Mapping is a technique used in 3D games to reduce or remove moire
patterns, artefacts, twinklies, sparklies. As a polygon gets
further away from the viewer a lower resolution and pre-filtered
texture map is selected. Even with the best anti-aliasing and
gaussian filtering, repeating tiled patterns such as bricks, corrugated
iron, wire, grills etc produce artefacts when they are at a distance
from the camera or at an acute angle. This extension attempts to
solve these problems by using the angle and the distance from the
rendering camera to select progressively lower resolution textures from
the
sub-channels.
Download the
MipMapper for Carrara 5 WINDOWS (262k)
Download
the
MipMapper for Carrara 5 MAC(41k)
Download
the
MipMapper for Carrara 5 MAC-Intel(132k) , (thanks to Dave Larson for this build)
Download the
MipMapper for Carrara 4 WINDOWS (348k)
Download
the
MipMapper for Carrara 4 MAC(26k)
Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
Email me, Jeremy@Sparrowhawke3D.com
This is an amateur project so I cant promise much in the way of
support. I'm keen to improve the plug-in and want to share it
with fellow Carrara users.
For anyone interested in the source code:
Download
the source code files
for use with the Carrara 5 SDK (6k)
The following images rendered in
Carrara 5 illustrate what the mip mapper does.
Each example shows two parallel infinite planes with the same repeating
brick pattern. The plane on the right used the MipMapper to
select and blend from 3 texture maps, the plane on the left used only
the highest resolution texture map directly in the glow channel.
This first image is with AntiAliasing set to 'none' and all the texture
map filtering is set to 'sampling' only.
The next image is with AntiAliasing set to 'Best' and all the texture
map filtering is set to 'sampling' only.
The last image is with AntiAliasing set to 'Best' and all the texture
map filtering set to 'Gaussian Filtering'
These are the mip maps used in the test; highest resolution for up
close and the lowest for far away.
